Steam, Valve's celebrated game distribution service, announced earlier today that the company now caters to over 65 million gamers, playing from a catalog of over 3,000 games. In just 12 months, Steam added 15 million new accounts, resulting in an impressive growth of 30%. While Valve did pull ahead of Xbox Live (which has 48 million users), Sony's PlayStation Network still maintains a long lead (110 million users).

2013 has been a particularly exciting year for Valve. After announcing three new Steam products (Steam OS, Steam Controller and Steam Machines), the software company is gearing up to welcome a new hardware division when it begins shipping the first round of beta Steam Machines hardware (limited to 300 beta participants only) in the coming weeks.

STEAM PASSES 65 MILLION

Valve today announced 30% growth in active accounts during the trailing 12 months on Steam, a leading platform for PC, Mac, and Linux software.

Now offering over 3,000 games and software titles to over 65 million accounts, 2013 also marked Steam's 10 year anniversary of providing services to gamers. Expanding upon that history, Steam gamers saw the introduction of several new service features during the year, including Family Sharing, Steam Trading Cards, Early Access, and support for Linux titles.

Looking ahead to 2014, Valve looks to expand Steam's services and offerings to gamers and developers by holding the Steam Developer Days in Seattle, WA this January and rolling out the recently announced Steam Machines with a variety of hardware partners later in the year.

"The main goal of Steam has always been to increase the quality of the user's experience by reducing the distance between content creators and their audience," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "As the platform grows, our job is to adapt to the changing needs of both the development and user communities. In the coming year, we plan to make perhaps our most significant collaborations with both communities through the Steam Dev Days and the Steam Machines beta."